Providing urban birds nutritious food to feed chicks reduces urban versus rural breeding success disparities.

Abstract

In Focus: Seress, G, Sándor, K, Evans, KL, Liker, A. (2020) Food availability limits avian reproduction in the city: An experimental study on great tits Parus major . Journal of Animal Ecology. 89. Animals in urban areas face a multitude of stressors, but how each stressor impacts survival and fitness can be difficult to disentangle. We need experimental manipulations of suspected stressors to examine causal relationships with traits of free-living urban and rural animals. In this issue, Seress and colleagues take on an intensive experimental approach to test whether one potential stressor-limited natural food sources in cities-can explain reduced avian reproductive success in urban areas. They employ a full factorial design, including both food supplemented and control broods in both urban and forest great tit Parus major populations. The findings are clear. Reduced food availability is the key factor limiting urban offspring growth and survival, at least in this well-studied species. Indeed, the extra insects fed to urban chicks greatly reduced the significant differences in survival rates and body sizes between urban and forest broods. The findings are also sobering. Urban insect populations would need to more than double to erase differences in reproductive success between urban and rural bird populations, an unlikely outcome with the ever-increasing urbanization of habitats.